Our Guarantee

As of 2-07-07 our guarantee covers replacement of any parts that are damaged or missing in shipment, or which fail within the first year of operation.

If you have an issue with your newly completed kit, the first thing to do is return to the manual and compare your work with the photos. If it doesn't look like the picture you should work to make it look like the picture. Excess leads hanging out of terminals and long looping bare leads where they should be short can create shorts that will break the piece of gear. Carefully inspect each and every solder joint visually for a good coating of solder on all the leads and the proper fillet. Make sure all of the electrolytic capacitors, rectifier diodes and LEDs are oriented properly. This will eliminate 99% of the potential problems.

If you are still having trouble the next thing to do is post your problem on the Bottlehead Forum, including in your post the resistance and voltage readings that do not match up with those in the manual. The forum is constantly monitored by hundreds of fellow Bottleheads and a lot of them have years of experience to offer. Most often a solution will be offered the same day you post, often within hours.

In the past we also had a "make it work for free" offer. We have found over the years that our manuals and our Bottlehead forum have become such effective tools for assembly and troubleshooting by the builder that we don't see kits coming to us that just need simple mis-wires and the like repaired anymore. These simple types of repairs were more common with our earlier kits and the less well developed manuals and that accompanied them, and they were the ones Doc intended to repair himself under our fix it for free policy. Over the past year or so we have found the few repairs that come to us require far more bench time than Doc can dedicate to a single repair, often needing major reworking of the entire kit due to bad or incomplete solder joints throughout, unauthorized modifications, or construction that was never completed or partially dismantled. To cover the labor cost of these few repairs would mean an across the board price increase. We feel that it is not really fair to tax everyone in this way when only a few need this kind of repair service.

As an alternative we now direct customers who need a kit repaired to our factory authorized technician, Ed Fallon. Ed's turn around time is much faster than Doc's ever was, and his service rates are very reasonable. He will also take on partially built kits that you may not have been able to finish, discuss and implement custom modifications, and he can also build a kit for you from the ground up.

So if you still have trouble after consulting the manual and the Bottlehead Forum, contact Ed. Like Doc, he has yet to meet a Bottlehead kit that he couldn't fix.